FBI Seizes Arizona Senate's 2020 Election Audit Records in Federal Probe

The FBI now holds records from the Arizona State Senate's contested 2020 election review after a federal grand jury issued a subpoena that Senate President Warren Petersen said he received and honored last week.

"Late last week I received and complied with a federal grand jury subpoena for records relating to the Arizona State Senate's 2020 audit of Maricopa County," Petersen wrote Monday on X. "The FBI has the records. Any other report is fake news."

The move signals an expansion of a Justice Department criminal investigation into purported irregularities in the 2020 presidential election, according to three people familiar with the matter cited by The New York Times. The subpoena added Arizona to a probe that, roughly five weeks earlier, produced an FBI search warrant executed at the Fulton County, Georgia, elections office, where agents seized hundreds of boxes of 2020 ballots and transported them to an FBI records complex in Virginia.

Whether the Georgia and Arizona actions are formally part of the same grand jury investigation remains unclear. The FBI had not responded to requests for comment from multiple outlets as of Monday.

Maricopa County, the largest and most influential county in the swing state, recorded 2.1 million ballots in the 2020 election. Joe Biden's victories in both Arizona and Georgia provided crucial Electoral College margins in his defeat of Donald Trump that year.

The Arizona Senate's review, which ran through 2021, was ordered by Republican senators and conducted by Cyber Ninjas, a company with no prior experience auditing election results. The company shuttered in 2022. Maricopa County officials responded to the Senate's final report with a 93-page rebuttal, concluding that the only error the audit correctly identified was that 50 ballots had been mistakenly double-counted, a discrepancy far too small to alter the outcome.

Trump reacted swiftly after the right-wing outlet Just the News reported on the subpoena. He shared the story on Truth Social and wrote: "Great!!! FBI secretly seizes election records from Arizona's largest county as voting probe expands."

The former president's enthusiasm underscores the political context surrounding the investigation. Trump has grown increasingly outspoken about election security ahead of the 2026 midterms, and the Justice Department's moves into both Georgia and Arizona have reignited disputes over the 2020 race that his allies never fully abandoned.

The scope of what was transferred to the FBI remains undefined. Petersen's statement confirmed compliance but provided no inventory of records produced. It is also unclear whether the subpoena extended to communications, vendor documentation from Cyber Ninjas, or materials held by individual Senate staff.

NPR reported that the affidavit supporting the earlier Fulton County seizure relied on debunked claims, a detail that raises questions about the evidentiary foundation underpinning at least part of this broader inquiry. CNN characterized Trump's assertions that the 2020 election was stolen as baseless.

With the Justice Department silent and the grand jury's proceedings sealed by law, the full scope of the investigation, which states or individuals it may yet reach, and whether any charges are being contemplated will not be known until prosecutors choose to act or speak publicly.